Cyrus Daruwala’s ‘Trees of Aarey’ comic protests the Metro III project that would cause the felling of thousands of trees.

The city of Mumbai is losing whatever little green cover it has left. The third phase of its Metro project, from Colaba in the south to the special economic zone of Seepz in the west, will lead to the felling of a reported 5,012 trees. Around 2,000 of these will be lopped in just Aarey Colony, which is one of Mumbai’s remaining green lungs, to make room for a car shed and a workshop.

This is not all. About 1.5 km of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a protected area in the north, could be deforested to widen a stretch of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad National Highway 8. To the east of the massive national park, Thane Creek could lose its mangroves to real estate, if the municipal corporation goes ahead with the plan to include the patch as “landed mass” in the new development plan.

All these proposals have been met with strident criticism, but the project in Aarey Colony in particular has kindled anger among citizen groups and even political parties. Officials from the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation have attempted to pacify these groups by promising that a similar number of trees will be planted in other areas of the city (although replenishing the lost green cover could take years). For now, the Mumbai High Court has stayed the felling of Aarey trees.

In this hullabaloo, a comic series is trying to inject the only voice that matters: of Aarey Colony’s trees.

The Trees of Aarey follows a four-panel format. In each comic, trees named Shanti, Bodhi or Clump, talk directly to the reader, pointing out the hypocritical way in which Mumbaikars treat the city.

“So I have heard, that I’m to make way for a faster mode of transport,” a tree named Woodie says in a comic. “Humans sure are in a hurry...to destroy their last defence against air pollution.”

“We are so casual in our handling of nature and natural resources,” said Cyrus Daruwala, the cartoonist behind the project. “I tried to imagine what a tree would say if it could speak to us.”

The 33-year-old creative director at an advertising firm has been following the developments in the Metro III project since its announcement in 2013. Realising that it would lead to loss of trees, Daruwala, who grew up in Andheri, turned to his memories of spending quiet moments in Aarey Colony.

“The project began out of disbelief and sadness, that these memories of mine will literally be eroded forever, for a metro car shed,” Daruwala said. “I felt helpless, and so I turned to what I do best, the power of communication.”

About the device of having the trees directly address the reader, the cartoonist said, “We are used to this passive image of a tree, and Trees of Aarey humanises them in a way.”

The ideas come to Daruwala while he is travelling in Mumbai’s local trains. His earlier comics – I Take This Train Too and Painful People – also take inspiration from the city. Even though Daruwala and many citizens like him are protesting the government’s move, the plans to build the Metro III seem to remains on track for a 2021 inauguration. Even so, Daruwala has not lost hope.

“Obviously the objective is to prevent the trees from being uprooted,” he said. “But it would be naive of me to presume that my comic series can achieve that. Rather I hope to spark conversations, among the common citizens and also hopefully, the people in positions of power. Why should we feel powerless in guiding public policy, in a democracy? I’m sure that if enough people voice their concerns, our government will take note.”

Tracing the formation of Al Qaeda and its path to 9/11

A new show looks at some of the crucial moments leading up to the attack.

“The end of the world war had bought America victory but not security” - this quote from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, ‘The Looming Tower’, gives a sense of the growing threat to America from Al Qaeda and the series of events that led to 9/11. Based on extensive interviews, including with Bin Laden’s best friend in college and the former White House counterterrorism chief, ‘The Looming Tower’ provides an intimate perspective of the 9/11 attack.

Lawrence Wright chronicles the formative years of Al Qaeda, giving an insight in to Bin Laden’s war against America. The book covers in detail, the radicalisation of Osama Bin Laden and his association with Ayman Al Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who preached that only violence could change history. In an interview with Amazon, Wright shared, “I talked to 600-something people, but many of those people I talked to again and again for a period of five years, some of them dozens of times.” Wright’s book was selected by TIME as one of the all-time 100 best nonfiction books for its “thoroughly researched and incisively written” account of the road to 9/11 and is considered an essential read for understanding Islam’s war on the West as it developed in the Middle East.

‘The Looming Tower’ also dwells on the response of key US officials to the rising Al Qaeda threat, particularly exploring the turf wars between the FBI and the CIA. This has now been dramatized in a 10-part mini-series of the same name. Adapted by Dan Futterman (of Foxcatcher fame), the series mainly focuses on the hostilities between the FBI and the CIA. Some major characters are based on real people - such as John O’ Neill (FBI’s foul-mouthed counterterrorism chief played by Jeff Daniels) and Ali Soufan (O’ Neill’s Arabic-speaking mentee who successfully interrogated captured Islamic terrorists after 9/11, played by Tahar Rahim). Some are composite characters, such as Martin Schmidt (O’Neill’s CIA counterpart, played by Peter Sarsgaard).

The series, most crucially, captures just how close US intelligence agencies had come to foiling Al Qaeda’s plans, just to come up short due to internal turf wars. It follows the FBI and the CIA as they independently follow intelligence leads in the crises leading up to 9/11 – the US Embassy bombings in East Africa and the attack on US warship USS Cole in Yemen – but fail to update each other. The most glaring example is of how the CIA withheld critical information – Al Qaeda operatives being hunted by the FBI had entered the United States - under the misguided notion that the CIA was the only government agency authorised to deal with terrorism threats.

The depth of information in the book has translated into a realistic recreation of the pre-9/11 years on screen. The drama is even interspersed with actual footage from the 9/11 conspiracy, attack and the 2004 Commission Hearing, linking together the myriad developments leading up to 9/11 with chilling hindsight. Watch the trailer of this gripping show below.

Play

The Looming Tower is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, along with a host of Amazon originals and popular movies and TV shows. To enjoy unlimited ad free streaming anytime, anywhere, subscribe to Amazon Prime Video.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Amazon Prime Video and not by the Scroll editorial team.